Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded Tor Project.[1] A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering,[2] Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma.[3] As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director.[4]

The Tor Project develops and maintains ... The Tor Browser system, also known as The Onion Router ... a free, open source and sophisticated privacy tool that provides anonymity for web surfing and communication

as well as developing and maintaining other software tools and applications.[5][6] As of December 2016, Dingledine continues in a leadership role with the Tor project, as a Project Leader, Director, and Research Director.[4] Shari Steele acts as the Tor project's Executive Director, formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She joined in December 2015.[5]

Dingledine was named as one of the 2006 thirty-five Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, for his work on internet anonymization technologies through the Tor Project.[1] The Review described the importance of the work in this way:

A dissident in China uses Web-based e-mail to contact a journalist in Canada. An intelligence agency wants to surveil a foreign website. Like every operation on the Internet, these activities leave tracks. Online anonymity measures provide a way around this problem; one of the most advanced is Tor, or the Onion Router. / Computer scientist Roger Dingledine developed Tor ...[1]

Dingledine has drawn attention after the leak of NSA documents by Edward Snowden, and public disclosure of the rules guiding the operation of XKeyscore, the NSA's collection system, given XKeyscore's targeting of Tor Project onion servers, including the one Dingledine runs at MIT, which serves a directory authority for the system, as well as being the base of operation of the MixMinion mail service, and host to various gaming and other websites (from which the NSA might be collecting IP addresses).[7]

^As described by the MIT Technology Review at the time of the launch of The Tor Project, its function at the time was as follows. "To disguise Internet traffic's origins, Tor plots a route through any three of more than 700 volunteer-run Onion routers around the world. It sets up a two-way link between the sender's computer and the final router in the chain; data passed between them is encrypted in three layers, and each router in the chain peels off one layer along the way. Each data packet "remembers" only the address of the last router it visited. That way, even if the data is intercepted before the final router hands it off to the recipient, it's difficult to trace back to the sender." See MIT Tech Rev Staff, 2006, op. cit.